Only a week after the terrible storm 'Sandy' hit the city, and in the wake of yet another, smaller, storm forecasted for later today, I am excited but also hopeful for the weekend ahead. As I am sure many of you have done also, I've been following the news in the aftermath of the hurricane. I have many friends in New York, most of them photographers, and my thoughts and best wishes for a quick recovery and clean-up have been with them during all of past week.

Checking in with Joel, I know that the workshop, scheduled for November 10-13 has not been affected, and will go ahead as planned. According to the latest news, there is still one seat left available, so if you can make this happen on short notice head on over here for more information.

For today's image, I have looked through my archive and found an image I photographed in New York in 2009:

To capture this image, I used a Mamiya 7 medium format film camera with a 43mm lens. Film stock was Fuji Across. Exposure, as I recall, was about 8 minutes with 16 stops of ND filtration.

The Mamiya 7 is an excellent camera for long exposure work. Lenses are small but very sharp, and I especially love the rangefinder which let's me keep the ND filters mounted to the lens at all times while composing and focusing using the rangefinder. I still have this camera, and anyone interested in using film for long exposure work, should take a closer look at one of these.

I scanned the film, which was in native 6cm x 7cm format, using an Imacon virtual drum-scanner. The resulting file, crpped to square format, is over 400 megabytes in size (something I cannot even achieve using my digital back).

This was shot on Times Square, with the camera mounted on a fence pointed straight up into the sky. New York is notorious for not letting you use tripods out on the streets (unless you have a permit of course), and I remember vividly being chased by a security guard when I initially set this up. Luckily, I had one of those small Gorilla Pods with me. This flexible tripod was able to be mounted to the top of a fence, and the strongest version they sell was strong enough to hold my camera easily. The security guard looked at me, and let me continue without further disruptions. Pretty cool.

I am excited to return to New York and do a lot more shooting this coming week. If you take a look at what Joel has planned, you cannot help but be impressed by the detailed routes and information he has provided. New York is one of the top destination for architectural photographers, and I am sure everyone will not only have a ton of fun, but also come home with some amazing images.

In an effort to pack 'light', which is something I am actually very terrible at, I have left the Mamiya at home this time and instead brought my Cambo WDS along. I have written about this rare camera earlier on this blog, it's the same one I used during my trip to Iceland in May of this year. It's a specialized camera for architecture, so I think it will fit the bill perfectly.

I will be posting images from New York so please stay tuned and check the blog for updates!